Channel your energy

15th September 2024

I start this week with a salutary tale, because while Big Brother may not be watching you, Amazon certainly is.

You will, if you’ve been taking notes, recall that we spent some of last Sunday afternoon dismantling one of the wardrobes and taking it downstairs, as a start to making space for our new furniture. It was whilst we were doing this and sorting out the stuff that was inside it that I remarked to Stephen that maybe I should have a new pair of flip flops for the holiday in Cyprus, a thought which had occurred to me that morning when we were on our ultimate summer beach walk.

Now this is not anything I had really thought about before, and I certainly hadn’t looked for any online, so how come on Monday morning I had an email from Amazon.it with some suggestions for things I might like, and three of them were for flip flops? I’ll leave you to ponder on that faintly disturbing occurrence.

Two good, and less strange, things happened on Tuesday. The first was the arrival of a jump starter for the next time we find ourselves stranded in a car park in Porto San Giorgio, or anywhere for that matter, because the battery is flat. This starter is now fully charged and safely stowed in the boot, with a reminder added to my “to do” app to check it monthly in a concerted effort to outwit our car curse in having both battery and starter out of power at the same time.

The second good thing was, after some protracted difficulties, Stephen was finally able to pin down the electrician, recommended by Bertrando, to a day and time to come and recce some work we wanted doing, mainly prompted by having to reconfigure the plugs in the dressing room because of the new wardrobes . The man had been humming and hawing for a few days as Stephen messaged and/or chatted with him – a situation not helped by his apparent inability to listen to what was being said. Stephen eventually gave up trying to tell him that his name wasn’t Marco, just like he seemed unable to get him to understand that he would be met at the top of the road. It was, therefore, with crossed fingers that when he said Thursday at 16.30, both parties had received and understood the message correctly.

We had pencilled in a jaunt to Corridomnia for Thursday evening. We needed a couple of things from Risparmio Casa and some of the plastic chews, the only ones that Harry deigns to like, and which only seem to be found at Arcaplanet, the pet shop. You may think, though, that was just an excuse to treat ourselves to the midweek all-you-can eat dinner menu at DiverXo – purely for research reasons, of course. It was an easy matter to switch this to Wednesday, working on the basis from experience that times in Italy, especially from tradesmen, are a moveable feast, and you can never be sure how much head shaking accompanied by sharp intakes of breath there will be.

As it turned out, Stephen needn’t have left work early as it was an hour after the expected time that a message came from the electrician saying he was on his way, and he came down the road under his own steam. Fortunately, he also made it out again under his own steam, just - but with the weather having turned a bit rainy making the road damp, he slewed from side to side, churning the surface as he battled to make it over the steepest part.

Once it was established what Stephen’s true name was, it didn’t actually take long to size up the work, with the electrician putting his business head on while things were explained to him.  He was fine with moving the plugs in the dressing room, though Stephen’s idea to channel the cable for the internet into the wall was vetoed because of the pipes for the shower room next door. He was also ok with fixing the light socket in the bedroom and the plug socket by the sink and adding an extra socket by the TV in the living room so we can dispense with the adaptor. A price and a date (25th September) were agreed, so all that was left was for him to drive off and churn up the road.

Although it had been a tad on the damp side the previous day, it was still a shock on Friday when we awoke to rain and Stephen had to don his waterproof poncho for Harry’s early morning comfort walk. It did ease off after that, but a pretty grey and not very warm day (what do you mean, the temperature was under 20°?) saw me donning long trousers for the first time in three months for our usual haircut and shopping outing.

That, of course, was after I’d taken Harry for his longer morning walk. It was still looking a bit threatening but this didn’t deter the workmen laying the pipes, which had now gone past the halfway mark in Mario and Luigi’s field. This was why we had to step to the side for their flatbed truck to pass us as we neared the top of the road: leaving it by our house and walking down the lane to the work site being more convenient than where they had parked up previously. They were followed shortly afterwards by another man, in a white people carrier, who exchanged waves with me as he passed.

I was a little concerned when I was coming back down to see his car stopped, with its reversing lights showing, just where the road became steepest. My heart sank, though I was a little puzzled because cars don’t usually get stuck going down. The driver got out just before I reached him and examined the hill, then turned and told me that he was here to check on the work, but wasn’t sure about getting back up. At last, I thought, someone with a bit of sense. We had a brief discussion at the end of which he said he thought he would leave it till Monday. “Yes,” I said, “you don’t want to spend the weekend here.” How we laughed.

Obviously, the weekend couldn’t compare with such excitement, especially as Stephen left for Milan yesterday morning, using my taxi service to get to the station. With just the two of us left at home, it’s been a comfortingly uneventful couple of days: some household chores, some cooking for the freezer, some reading, just the normal dull everyday stuff in peace and quiet. What’s not to like?

P.S. A picture of the dispenser at Bar del Borgo that I forgot to post last week. Enjoy!